I started self-hosting in early July, and it’s been fairly straightforward. As a newcomer to blogging, I followed these instructions to install WordPress onto a HostGator domain. It cost $95 for three years of hosting, as well as an $18 domain name fee each year after the first year.
I have no way to compare with other hosts, but HostGator seems OK. The HostGator settings are not the easiest to navigate, but I only had to use them once (to update PHP, whatever that is). Be aware that your contact information—name, email, phone, address—is available online unless you pay $15 a year. I’m OK with that information being public, but you might not be. (I find the spam amusing: “I am a Web Design Web application 14 + years’ experience OK is eager on planning your new reserved .com Domain for your business?”)
I only used the WordPress editor once, and I don’t know whether that was the good one or the bad one. Instead, I write everything in Emacs’s Org mode and then post it via Org2Blog. I didn’t know anything about Org mode beforehand, but there wasn’t much to learn, since it’s basically plain text. (I know even less about Markdown, so I’m writing this in Org mode and exporting to Markdown.)
All of this was pretty fast. I bought my domain and hosting from HostGator on July 4, and my first post was on July 10. Let’s say that took at most 6 hours of my time, which includes writing the post and deciding on a template.
Transferring earlier blog posts to my new blog was easy, since my earlier “blog” was just a bunch of Google Documents. I don’t know how to transfer posts from a real blog, but maybe this would work.
I only have had two minor problems. About 5% of the time, Org2Blog can’t connect to the server, but turning my Wi-Fi off and on fixes that. (Probably. I don’t know for sure because the problem only occurred twice, so maybe something else was the solution.) And WordPress sometimes renames images that I upload via Org2Blog, so the blog post can’t find them. But once I figured out that the image names were changing, it was trivial to get around that.
I started self-hosting in early July, and it’s been fairly straightforward. As a newcomer to blogging, I followed these instructions to install WordPress onto a HostGator domain. It cost $95 for three years of hosting, as well as an $18 domain name fee each year after the first year.
I have no way to compare with other hosts, but HostGator seems OK. The HostGator settings are not the easiest to navigate, but I only had to use them once (to update PHP, whatever that is). Be aware that your contact information—name, email, phone, address—is available online unless you pay $15 a year. I’m OK with that information being public, but you might not be. (I find the spam amusing: “I am a Web Design Web application 14 + years’ experience OK is eager on planning your new reserved .com Domain for your business?”)
I only used the WordPress editor once, and I don’t know whether that was the good one or the bad one. Instead, I write everything in Emacs’s Org mode and then post it via Org2Blog. I didn’t know anything about Org mode beforehand, but there wasn’t much to learn, since it’s basically plain text. (I know even less about Markdown, so I’m writing this in Org mode and exporting to Markdown.)
All of this was pretty fast. I bought my domain and hosting from HostGator on July 4, and my first post was on July 10. Let’s say that took at most 6 hours of my time, which includes writing the post and deciding on a template.
Transferring earlier blog posts to my new blog was easy, since my earlier “blog” was just a bunch of Google Documents. I don’t know how to transfer posts from a real blog, but maybe this would work.
I only have had two minor problems. About 5% of the time, Org2Blog can’t connect to the server, but turning my Wi-Fi off and on fixes that. (Probably. I don’t know for sure because the problem only occurred twice, so maybe something else was the solution.) And WordPress sometimes renames images that I upload via Org2Blog, so the blog post can’t find them. But once I figured out that the image names were changing, it was trivial to get around that.